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Maintaining Proper Color Temperature While On the Go

LOS ANGELES—On a tangential
topic for television
lighting, this
month I wanted to talk
about color temperature—
not just the basics
of “tungsten” and
“daylight”—but how
we dealt with rapidly
varying color temperatures
while shooting a reality show. For
the last 25 days I’ve been traveling through
Canada and the United States doing home
visits for a show I’m producing and directing
called “My Hollywood.” The show is a
documentary-style reality where we follow
kids (ages 8-17), who have dreams of “making
it” in Hollywood. My two primary cameras
are the Panasonic AG-HPX500 and the
AG-HPX370, both shooting DVCPRO HD. I
operated a third camera, a JVC GY-HM100U.

We’re constantly on the move: indoors,
outdoors, day, night, fluorescents, tungsten,
daylight, neon, you name it, we’ve
got it captured in the show. Following
kids from interiors to exteriors, kitchens
to hallways to bedrooms, riding in cars, in
restaurants, out at night begs the question:
“When you’re really running and gunning,
how do you keep up with the color temperature?”

THE INDISPENSIBLE EXPODISC
For “My Hollywood,” I gave my director
of photography, Benjamin Molyneux, an
ExpoDisc, one of my favorite never-leave-home-without-it tools. It’s a precisely calibrated
piece of semi-opaque plastic that
only allows 18 percent of light to transmit
through it in a perfectly neutral gray.
You pop the ExpoDisc in front of the lens,
point the camera at your primary light
source (or mixed source) and white balance
through the card: Viola! You’ve got
the most accurate white balance I’ve ever
found.

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But... that takes time. And we only had
one ExpoDisc on the show so Ben would
have to balance his camera and then hand
it off to our B camera operator, Rachel Lippert,
so she could balance hers. Because
the controls on the JVC are pretty funky
(an iris control I liken to “Flick-my-Bic-Exposure-
Control”), and because I was running
with the small cam on a SteadyPod—
which was awkward when adjusting the
settings on the fly—I often ran in the
dreaded “auto” for focus, iris and white
balance. My little C cam was just the frosting
to Ben and Rachel’s cake, however.

When we could, the ExpoDisc was the
way to go; great neutral color balance, even
in mixed situations. When we couldn’t,
things got a lot trickier. Discussing the look
and our efficiency with Ben, we decided
on a camera preset of 3200K (Tungsten)
with an “A” white balance at about 4200
and the “B” balance at 55/5600. This gave
us three quick looks for when we were really
on-the-go: indoor, mixed and outdoor,
which was often enough to keep us rolling
in mixed situations, or moving around
a house with a shockingly varied mix between
dark tungsten-lit areas and near-nuclear
daylight areas.

COLOR CHOICES
Color balance is further complicated by
the fact that the HPX500 has a black-and-white
viewfinder. This required Molyneux
to be hyper diligent with his color choices
as cameras moved from one area to another
on a continual basis.

Augmenting further, we carried a set of
Litepanels Croma fixtures, which are small
LED panels with both 3200K Tungsten
LEDs and 5600K Daylights. I went with
the Cromas as they’re the lightest dual-temperature
LED fixtures I’ve found with
very accurate color rendition with very
little to no green content. They’re simple
to use with one knob to adjust brightness
and one knob to adjust the blend between
3200K and 5600K. These came in great
handy on both A and B cameras to add a
little fill when things got too dark. They
run on six AA batteries, which is really
convenient—although the fact that they
burn through the batteries isn’t so convenient.
Worse, when the batteries get low,
the lights flash on and off, not just dim; a
sure-fire way to ruin any take.

Running them sparingly—and not at
100 percent (which was rarely needed)—
kept them running on a set of batteries
pretty much all day. What we really needed
was LitePanel’s D-tap battery cable to plug
directly into our Anton Bauer mounts on
the cameras, but, alas, we didn’t have those
with us. Next trip, we certainly will and
that will solve that problem and make the
Cromas a perfect choice. We traveled with
a Croma “Flight Kit”—three Croma panels
with light stands, shoe mounts, and miscellaneous
accoutrements to support the
small fixtures all packed in a small rolling
Pelican case. We only pulled them out to
do off-camera lighting with the Cromas
just once during the shoot, in a small, confined
kid’s bedroom where our Arri Kit
would have been way too obtrusive and
intense.

Jay Holben is the technical editor of
Digital Video and a contributor to Government
Video. He is also the author of
the book “A Shot in the Dark: A Creative
DIY Guide to Digital Video Lighting on
(Almost) No Budget.”